A Bird's Eye Review

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The World’s Wife – By Carol Ann Duffy.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5
This anthology of 30 poems was published in 1999, ten years before Duffy became poetry’s first female Laureate. The central aim is to broadcast the hypothetical female voices of their celebrated historical and fictional spouses and, like all the best ideas, is simple but effective. Sure, some of these perspectives do seem politically destined to put crosses in feminist tick-boxes, but Duffy is careful, for the most part, not too rub our faces too hard in it. Where the premise works best is in the widely abundant, graph-plot levels of whimsy and wit, full of colloquialism and wrapped in wryness. In ‘Mrs. Midas’, for example, “I served up the meal. For starters, corn on the cob / Within seconds he was spitting out the teeth of the rich.”

There is some wonderful evocation of imagery too, appropriate to the subject matter. In ‘Mrs. Lazarus’: “I heard his mother’s crazy song. I breathed / His stench; my bridegroom in his rotting shroud / Moist and dishevelled from the grave’s slack chew.”

But then there are a few poems that drift into territories of a personal bent. Their explicitness, however heartfelt, probably belongs elsewhere if we are to see a consistent train of ideas and characters emerge. These are poems of a different flesh, shoe-horned to the purpose in hand, one feels. In ‘Mrs. Tiresias’, for example, although Duffy is validly withering of the male aspect when confronted with female hardships, she can’t quite resist dropping in a pert fantasy of her own:

“and this is my lover, I said
[..] and watched the way he stared
At her violet eyes
At the blaze of her skin
At the slow caress of her hand on the back of my neck
And saw him picture
Her bite
Her bite at the fruit of my lips
And hear
My red wet cry in the night.”

The poems themselves are scattered liberally throughout without apparent order, caustic railing followed by existential wailing followed by breezy, bar-room banter. Thankfully, there are many more of the latter and the supporting idea is all the better served by it. These wifely stories always relate better with sarky, hindsight voices, suffused with a wink-wink knowledge of their purpose, to show us how it should have been done, or why it was done so well, a whisper from behind the hand of the great woman behind every so-called great man. Or, as the old joke goes: ‘For sale, complete set of Encyclopedia Brittanica. Just got married. Wife knows everything.’

In summary, the intent behind the collection is entertaining, thoughtful and well served. The wit and lightness of this anthology does become occasionally tainted by Duffy’s personality though, which would be fine in a work tasked for that purpose. Here though, if feels like the poetic equivalent of author intrusion. Were Duffy not Laureate, not lesbian, this might be an invisible detail. Unfortunately or otherwise, because of those things, in a very few places, it is not.